A COMPARISON STUDY OF SPACE RADIATION DOSE ANALYSIS PROGRAMS: SPENVIS SECTORING TOOL AND SIGMA II

A space radiation analysis has been used to evaluate an ability of electronic equipment boxes or spacecrafts to endure various radiation effects, so it helps design thicknesses of structure and allocate components to meet the radiation requirements. A comparison study of space radiation dose analysis programs SPENVIS Sectoring Tool (SST) and SIGMA II is conducted through some structure cases, simple sphere shell, box and representative satellite configurations. The results and a discussion of comparison will be given. A general comparison will be shown for understanding those programs. The both programs use the same strategy, solid angle sectoring with ray-tracing method to produce an approximate dose at points in representative simple and complex models of spacecraft structures. Also the particle environment data corresponding to mission specification and radiation transport data are used as input data. But there are distinctions between them. The specification of geometry model and its input scheme, the assignment of dose point and the numbers, the prerequisite programs and ways of representing results will be discussed. SST is a web-based interactive program for sectoring analysis of complex geometries. It may be useful for a preliminary dose assessment with user-friendly interfaces and a package approach. SIGMA II is able to obtain from RSICC (Radiation Safety Information Computational Center) as a FOR-TRAN 77 source code. It may be suitable for either parametric preliminary design or detailed final design, e.g. a manned flight or radiation-sensitive component configuration design. It needs some debugs, recompiling and a tedious work to make geometrical quadric surfaces for actual spacecraft configuration, and has poor documentation. It is recommend to vist RSICC homepage and GEANT4/SSAT homepage.